I have already written a first post "Sleep apnea - what is it, how common is it and how does it affect mortality & physical health?"which highlights that sleep apnea is a common, regularly unrecognised disorder, occurring in approaching 1 in 5 adults and that, particularly as it becomes more severe - probably approximately 1 in 10 sufferers (Li et al, 2015) - sleep apnea is linked with a wide range of serious diseases and with significantly increased death rates. In this second post, I'll look at the relevance of sleep apnea for psychiatric disorders.

Sleep apnea is a common, but frequently unrecognised, contributor to psychological difficulties and to health problems more generally. I would like to look at a series of questions about this disorder - what is it, how common is it, why is it important, how do you recognise it, and what can be done about it?

I was talking to an old friend recently and I remarked on how well he was looking. He said he had lost two stone in weight and his waist circumference had gone down from 42 to 34 inches. Wow! I was very interested to hear how he had done it and he very kindly agreed to write his story:

A Wake-up Call

Salman Rushdie "Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives - the power to retell it, re-experience it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change - truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts."

I wrote yesterday about "Commitment contracts: another good way of helping us reach our goals". In today's post I'd like to look a bit more at the practicalities of setting up and using commitment contracts. I'll illustrate this by talking about my own personal exploration of this area, but I'd also like to highlight that I think these ideas and the associated web resources are potentially very useful tools for psychotherapists, counsellors, life coaches and their clients.